The Soul Of The Ape. The Soul Of The White Ant

• Author: Dick Marais

About Book

• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Pages: 240.0
• isbn:
• GoodReads Rating: 4.1

Condition & Size

• Size: Extra Large
• Book Type: Hardcover
• Condition: As New

Summary

Eugène Marais's international acclaim is based largely on The Soul Of The Ape and The Soul Of The White Ant, his two pioneering studies of natural history. Here for the first time, these important works appear side by side in a single volume, splendidly illustrated with line drawings by Dick Findlay and numerous colour photographs. The introduction, Eugêne Marais and the Darwin Syndrome, is by Leon Rousseau, author of The Dark Stream, the prize winning life story of Marais. For Eugène Marais and the Darwin Syndrome Rousseau has made use of a mass of material in the possession of Marais's son, some which only came to light after the latter's death, a number of years after The Dark Stream was published. Drawing on extensive correspondence between Marais and his son during the time that Marais wrote The Soul Of The Ape, Rousseau suggests that Marais may have been trying to cast his son in the supportive role played in Darwin's life by his wife, Emma, finally arriving at the startling hypothesis that the son, whether consciously, subconsciously or by chance, hindered rather than helped the father in completing and publishing his opus magnum. Early in the twentieth century Marais retreated to the wild Northern Transvaal and lived for three years at close quarters with a troop of chacma baboons. The Soul Of The Ape is a record of his experiences, observations and deductions. Although it was completed in the form we know it today by 1919, publications of the manuscript was delayed for fifty years. Rousseau shows how a delay of twenty years in the publication of Darwin's Origin Of The Species almost caused him to be forestalled by others, and points out that Marais's work, while less distinguished than Darwin's, was also more resistant to the passing of time. Marais's sojourn in the animal kingdom also produced The Soul Of The White Ant, an absorbing study of termite life. Years of patient work in the veld led him to some conclusions of impressive originality. In 1926 Maurice Maeterlinck used Marais's central theory about the organic unity of the termitary without acknowledgement. Rousseau examines the question of whether this alleged plagiarism was indeed, as has been suggested, a contributing factor in his final collapse. Eugène Marais and the Darwin Syndrome provides a biographical overview of the multi-talented and enigmatic Marais. It draws tantalising parallels between him and Charles Darwin and it also places his two great works of natural history in the context of their time. In determining the importance of Marais's findings, Rousseau worked in close co-operation with a distinguished ethologist, Pofessor Anna E Rasa of the University of Pretoria, a student of Konrad Lorenz.